Status of portupgrade and portmaster?

[Carmel NY]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 09:27:40 +0000, Thomas Mueller stated:

>from Chris H:
>
>> FWIW I loved portmaster, but quickly found that by choosing it, I was
>> *instantly* at odds with a large majority of the FreeBSD crowd.
>> Eventually, I experimented with other choices, and finally landed on
>> ports-mgmt/synth, and never looked back. Like Carmel, I found some aspects
>> un-intuitive. But after figuring them out. I was hooked. John Marino did
>> a wonderful job on this, and is very helpful.  
>
>On one computer (motherboard MSI Z68MA-ED55(B3)), synth works great, as long
>as I avoid the options dialog and put the options
>in /usr/local/etc/synth/LiveSystem-make.conf

I have learned to put needed options in the "LiveSystem-make.conf" file. I
don't consider it a hindrance although others might.

>But there is the annoyance that many useful dependencies are not installed
>unless I type the command to install those already-built packages.

I have just the opposite experience. With "portupgrade" I was getting all too
many dependencies installed that I had no use for. I personally appreciate
synth's finer-grain installation philosophy. Perhaps an option to install
"ALL" dependencies could be added to synth's list of options. It is above my
pay grade.

>On the other computer, motherboard MSI Z77 MPOWER, same FreeBSD version,
>11.1-STABLE, synth fails most of the time and usually crashes.

Sorry, but I don't know enough about mother boards to be of any help to you
here. What is the error message and what does the log say about it?

>I believe John Marino is unfortunately banished from FreeBSD but might still
>be active with DragonFlyBSD.

Excuse my ignorance, but why was John Marino exiled?

>from Matt Smith:
>
>> I agree. Portmaster was useful for many years but these days it is being
>> left behind. The expectation is that ports are built in a clean room
>> environment and portmaster does not provide that. I used synth for several
>> months and it is a great tool. It works fine, but my problem with it is
>> that the developer was forced out of FreeBSD and it needs an ada compiler.  
>
>> I think on FreeBSD 12 the ada compiler is broken isn’t it? Meaning synth
>> will break. For this reason I switched to poudriere and that works fine for
>> me. As that is the tool used by the pkg builders themselves I know it will
>> work.  

I can see this as an excellent excuse NOT to update to the FreeBSD 12 when it
is officially released.
 
>> For example we are shortly getting flavors support in the ports tree. I
>> think the author of synth has already said he is not going to support this
>> whereas poudriere will straight away.  
>
>Building synth requires gcc6-aux, but gcc5-aux and gcc6-aux would not build
>following the introduction of ino64.
>
>I don't know if that has been fixed.
>
>John Marino attempted to port synth to NetBSD with pkgsrc, but last time I
>looked, gcc6-aux is broken on NetBSD, Makefile says so.
>
>Tom
>

-- 
Carmel